Valuing, displaying, and legitimizing language in the linguistic landscape of Hurghada’s tourism-commercial field

This study examines the shop-sign landscape of Hurghada’s tourism-commercial field to investigate how languages are distributed, visually organised, and socially legitimised in a tourism-oriented marketplace. Drawing on Bourdieu’s framework of cultural capital, it adopts a sequential multi-method design that combines a distributional analysis of 1,293 shop signs, a qualitative visual analysis of representative signs, and semi-structured interviews with 20 merchants and 20 tourists. The findings reveal a clear linguistic hierarchy rather than a random coexistence of codes: English occupied the most dominant and visible position, Arabic retained an important role in local grounding and practical accessibility, and Russian functioned as a more selective resource associated with specific tourist groups. Beyond these distributional patterns, the study shows that language in shop signs operates as more than a communicative tool. It is differentially valued by merchants, materialised through visual and commercial display, and gradually normalised as a legitimate form of tourism-facing business presentation. The study contributes to linguistic landscape research by moving beyond descriptive patterning toward a process-oriented account of how linguistic resources acquire market value and symbolic legitimacy within tourism-commercial space.